Rosemary
by ze-poodle
Summary: An man escapes a painful past and travels to the northernmost point of the Chaos Wastes, searching for a patron deity to give him a meaning where Imperial society failed. The gods he finds there are not what he desired, and not what he needs.


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_On the fourth day of April, I came to a valley that was little more than a crater in the ground. The sky above was black and empty of clouds. The ground was cracked and desolate. Four winds whispered in my ears. _

_I reached the lip of the crater and heard the sound of nothing. There were no birds here. No animals roamed. There was nothing but the sound of the wind and of desolation. _

_I climbed down the slope, the earth cracking and dissolved beneath my feet. _

_On the eastern side of the hollow, there was the mouth of a cave. From within it echoed the sounds of lust and coitus. I entered. The air was full and my breath steamed the air. My skin grew hot and heavy. Barely-suggested shadows flickered in the light of a dozen fires, silhouettes of men and women and animals. The cavern was filled with the sounds of joy and pleasure and pain. Their bodies were slick with sweat, blood and semen. The firelight made a dancing trickery of their union. _

_At the end of the long cavern, there was a naked body, neither male nor female, melded with the cave wall at the waist and shoulders. Its skin was pale and taut where it merged with the stone; its eyes were violent pink, without pupils. As I approached it raised its head and whispered to me in a voice that was forever teetering on orgasm. _

"_You," it said. "I will give you desire. I will give you riches and love. The women who rejected you. You shall have them, and much more. Sex. Sex, and sex, and sex. Eat all you want and never grow fat. Fuck all you want and never worry about the morning after. I will give you all the riches, all the food, the luxury any man could want, if you will but serve me. And the terms of your service will be so…wonderful."_

_I reached out and brushed the creature's face. It was rough and smooth, cold and unbearably warm. The thing shivered with pleasure, bit its lip and looked at me, with pink eyes, like a seductive albino. _

"_I'll bring her back for you. I can do that. She'll come to you this time…and this time she'll never hurt you again…" The thing smiled. "Not until you want her to."_

_I let it talk._

"_Wonderful. It will be so wonderful. Come. Enter me now. Be one with me…"_

_I turned and left. The asexual thing's cries followed, pleaded with me to stay. What I sought was not here._

_I left the cavern and walked west, following the faintest hint of screaming. There was an arena, a wide open space; a place designed for spectators, but the stands were empty. The pit was full. A thousand men fought and bled and sweat beneath a sun that was suddenly full and red, like a bloated ruby. I descended down the stairs of the arena stands and into the pit. A man with tusks and eyes like needles swung an axe at me, but overshot and his throat exploded as a spearhead the length of my arm cut through it. His blood, black and rich, spilled across my face. I wiped it off and walked towards the heart. The gladiators parted before me. _

_There was a skull in the middle of the arena, old and crusted with blood. I picked it up. It spoke to me. _

"_Blood. Glory. Blood. Death. Blood. Honour. Blood. Fight. Fight. Fight for…Fight. Fight." _

_I traced a hand over the skull's forehead and found that the blood was now wet and new. Its jaw clacked and its eyes burned, red as red gets. My heartbeat grew rapid and my vision swam with gold and crimson. I felt myself choking, my veins too thick to pump my blood, full and red and viscous…_

"_Blood. War. Blood. Pride. Blood. Heart. Blood. Glory. Blood. Death." _

"_Blood."_

"_Blood."_

_I put the skull down and left the arena. The gladiators stopped their warfare for one long moment and watched me leave. As I reached the stairs, their mouths opened. _

"_Fight. Fight. Fight. Fight. Fight." _

_Over and over and over and over. What I searched for was not here. _

_I then went to the centre of the valley and knelt to rest for a while. The sun beat down on my shoulders and brought up a sweat. The soil was black and smelled strongly of rosemary. I pondered this oddity. I thought of her face, and her eyes; so green. So alive. _

_At the southern end of the valley, there was an old and dilapidated house surrounded by what may have been a white picket fence. The door was disintegrating and mouldy. The garden was untended, overgrown with dead things. In the midst of putrid vegetables and black flowers, weeds flourished. A fly tentatively scouted my nose as a landing place. I caught it in my hand, listened to it flail in confusion, and then let it hum away to the middle of the rotten garden. _

_As I crossed the garden to the front door, I trod over several dead flowers. They crunched beneath my feet, not dry and crackly like a dead flower should be, but wet and alive. Everything here was dying, and yet nothing was dead. _

_I pushed the door and it burst into a cloud of dust and flies. Over a carpet of maggots and lice, I entered to the living room, where an old, thin grandfather with leprous skin the colour of green moss and patchy hair waited for me. _

_He chortled wetly. "Everything dying. Nothing dead. Choose. Want to die? No-one wants to die. I have an out for you, a trick in my bag of sacks. Want to cheat death, son?" _

_I drifted to the kitchen table. It was stacked high with fresh meat and fruit, eggs and sausages and a plate of apples. I picked one up, crushed it to a juicy mess in my hand. Worms and maggots hiding in its core spilled out and over my arm. I wiped them off and looked at the table again. Where there had once been abundance, there was nothing but bare dust and worms. _

"_That's all we are, son. Dust and worms," said the grandfather in a voice without fear. "Come with me and I'll show you just how industrious worms are. There are two truths in this world, son. Beauty, and impermanence." _

_It grinned, showing a mouth full of bright white teeth, shining and startling. _

"_I can get rid of both for you. Want to live a lie? Want to fuck your pain away, or revel in the pain you inflict on others? I'll get rid of pain for you, my boy. I'll make it a distant memory. All the pain. All the wounds others have given you. The pain she made you feel. I'll make you numb. You'll have no fear of death. Death will be like an old friend, the kind you invite over to play cards and drink with. You'll exist just to exist…to survive. Come with me and survive. Immortality, lad. Immortality." _

"_Come, son. Make your heart a stone and cover it with worms." _

_I left then. What I sought was not here._

_I crossed the gorge. The cave and the arena had disappeared, the song of lust and violence faded. The valley was long and the shadows were heavy. Above, vultures swooped and circled, silent. _

_At the northern end of the valley there was a book, sitting on a pedestal. Behind it were four thrones and two kings and two queens. _

_I walked up and the gentry looked at me. Their eyes were missing. The edges of the wounds were torn and ragged. Blood dripped from their eyes, flowing suddenly, soaking into the blue of their robes, turning them a vibrant purple. _

_I opened the book, upon whose cover was inscribed runes whose meaning I had once thought carried power. The parchment inside was blank and old, but not worn. _

_Words appeared and spiralled across the blank parchment, blue ink surging forth and pumping through the vellum like literary veins. They met and crossed in patterns of infernal complexity. I placed a hand on the page and the words, hungry for room, flowed from the pages and onto my skin. _

"_All things fear death," said a voice like pens scraping on paper, like ink drying. "This is logical and sensible. Death is an uncertainty. We do not know what lies behind it. We fear what we do not know. Ergo, we fear it. Mankind has lived in night for so long it has forgotten why the night is dark. The point of contention is whether or not death is something worthy of our fear. Indeed, is anything worth our fear? Surely, humanity is the master race. Surely it is the most versatile, most cunning, most inventive and most cruel of all the world's creatures. Nothing should be worth our fear."_

"_And yet we are scared. We are uncertain. We do not open ourselves to others because we are afraid of rejection. We do not treasure life because we fear its loss." It paused for effect. "It is hypocrisy. We are all afraid of rejection, so we reject all. We seek to know others – truly know them, to be inside their minds, crawling through the archives of their secrets, swimming in their emotion – so that we might be one with them. But we never are. We are always alone." _

_My head swam. _

_The book continued eagerly. "We harden our hearts and our minds, so that we can avoid misery by wallowing in it. We do not worship our lives. We mourn them. We spend all our lives searching for some fundamental truth, some reason, and a master controlling the puppets. We need a reason. We need a purpose. We need control. Over others. Over ourselves."_

_Words in a thousand languages crawled and fluttered, spiralled around my limbs. They clamoured for entrance to my body. I felt ink mix with my blood. _

"_Power. Power is what is important. You do not find power through sacrifice. You find power through force. You **take**__ what you want. You must be as cunning as a fox to see all plots, and as cruel as a wolf to counter them. You must fight other's ambition with your own. You will make the plots. You will not sit on any throne. You will not need a throne."_

_I said nothing._

"_I will teach you. I will teach you the whys and the hows, not the ifs and the whens. A strand of fate is what you are now. I shall weave for you a tapestry! Nations and kings shall crawl a thousand miles to kiss your feet. She left you for power! I will give you all the power a body can hold, and when you can hold no more, you will transcend the body and become…something else entirely." _

"_I can give you this. Serve me and I shall show you the way, the path. Things will change. I can make you change! I can make you rule! All I need is your service. Give yourself to me. Give yourself to me, and you shall find true –"_

_I turned around. The book cut off and there was an insulted silence._

"_Come back. Where are you going? Why would you reject this? I will give you everything! Not sex or wrath or a cursed half-life in a maggoty crypt! I will give you **infinity!** **Serve me!**"_

_I didn't answer. __The book went silent, and as I left I sensed the gentry opening their mouths. Words did not come forth. __Their tongues had been cut. __I left the pedestal and returned to the centre. _

_There was a rosemary bloom sprouting from the soil. I leant down and touched it, inhaling its scent. Memories reared forth. Ugly. Old. _

_Four winds whispered to me. From a cave to the west, men and women paused in their copulation to rise, naked and sweating, to come and chant to me. From an arena to the east, gladiators left their weapons and their limbs and walked across the blacked and loose plain. An old house in the south collapsed into dust and ash and spewed forth a swarm of dead things, crawling, buzzing, slithering, worming towards me. From the north came two kings and two queens, choking back words. _

"…_sex and sex and sex and sex…"_

"_Blood. Glory. Blood. Death. Blood. Blood…"_

"_Beauty, and impermanence…"_

"_We need a purpose. We need control. Over others. Over ourselves." _

_The chant rose and rose and boomed. The sound grew tangible and solid, swimming through the air like a shoal of dragons. It clenched at my head, crushed me. The sky was suddenly very close to the ground and there seemed to be no room to stand. I felt like dying. _

_Rosemary. _

_In a bedroom miles away, two figures rolled and clutched at sweaty white sheets. Their mouths opened in a perfect O, lost in the moment. In a kitchen next door, a woman cut and hacked and sawed away at her father's corpse to hide it before someone found her crime. In a hospice, a child wracked by infection choked and coughed its life away, its skin peeling and rotting while it lived. In the governor's office, the secretary listened to his employer, nodded, wrote down notes, and fantasised about the day he'd sit in that chair. _

_Beneath them all, a fifth wind blowed. The others fell silent. _

**VENGEANCE.**

_I looked at the sprig of rosemary, and it spoke to me. _

**I WILL GIVE YOU VENGANCE. IT WILL EMPTY YOU. IT WILL DRAIN YOU, HOLLOW YOU OUT, AND LEAVE YOU A CRACKED AND BROKEN SHELL OF WHAT YOU WERE. I WILL GIVE YOU VENGEANCE.**

**I WILL GIVE YOU…**

**PURPOSE.**

_I smiled._

_"Yes," I said._

_I remembered something I'd forgotten and it doubled me over with pain. I fell to the ground shaking, and then through the ground and into the earth._

_I looked back up and saw myself, standing in the middle of a broken heaven, but I didn't call out to him. That wasn't me any more._

_I came to a cavern beneath the earth. A man with a lizard's head gazed at me over a fire. The place smelled earthy and warm. Natural. The lizard's head hissed at me, and threw dust onto the fire so that it was extinguished and there was darkness. Roots of rosemary coiled and strained around me, and the fifth wind called to me. There was pain._

**I DO NOT ASK FOR YOUR SERVICE. I ASK FOR YOUR ALLEIGANCE.**

_The pain ceased to be local and became ever-present; not a feeling, not a bodily function, but a separate thing entirely. I felt my skin split and my eye burst. I slipped away and let my soul drift on the waves of…something._

**I CANNOT BRING HER BACK.**

_In my delirium, I became the earth and the plant. Its roots went deep into the loam and the soil, thrashing and sucking for moisture. The roots drilled into my limbs and bonded with flesh and tendon. The earth slipped and filled my throat and mouth. Lizards crawled through the hollows of my bones. I was lashed naked to a tree for nine days and nine nights. My right eye was a bloodied hole. Ravens pecked at the wound, but the pain was not exceptional._

_I._

_I._

_I…_

_Drifted._

**I CANNOT GIVE YOU WHAT YOU DESIRE.**

_Sunlight. I felt the burden of freedom settle upon me._

**BUT I CAN GIVE YOU WHAT YOU NEED.**

**RISE. **

_The earth quivered and moaned and shook around me, a violent birth. I pulled myself out of the earth and the earth came with me. The valley melted away until there was nothing. Not darkness. Not even oblivion. Just…nothing._

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**A/N:** Anyone heard of Malal? Because if you haven't, this won't make much sense. And I apologise for the profanity. I just like saying bad words. 


End file.
